nicolette ratz / two poems

The Naked Dark

after Georgia O'Keefe's Wave Night, 1928

The shoreline lies, I am the horizon, but we know better. Seagulls fast asleep somewhere not here; their webbed imprints washing away in the night sand. Miles out, in the soot blue, pinpricked and radiant, an effigy—flames so distant the paint would leak if it could—and a whole town wrapped around its base, sloshing beers and shouting, “Any minute now!” in honor of my homecoming. I rewet the ocean and wade out into the naked dark; I am lost here. A woken, weary-eyed seagull enters into frame, “Don’t worry,” he says. “Eventually, they’ll come looking for you.” Behind the gull, holding a thermos of warm cider from the faraway town—How did she get here? A girl. She could be me because she is. We play, building beach hills big enough to den in; we whisper so no one hears us. So much of life happens out of frame. A boat. The seagull is a seafarer untying ropes, the motor bubbles; he motions us toward the dock. When we land in the faint light, she’ll run. I count the seconds of her warm palm. We toddle on, tired. The boat splits obsidian as we drive townward, the shoreline stretching behind us—See, I am the horizon. The seafarer is our father tightlipped, looking out. He is mouthing nothing like a puppet because he isn’t here. In the hum, we wait.

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Brain Fog

Weathered in daze, weathered 

in days / disorder of

the organ-

ized. 

This crackslip storms

the drain / the storm drains

enlivens  

the green. This downward prayer :   

gravity (god,

in a way) and roots. Meristem, yes,

but not of bud (of descen-

dance in the wet dark). The same cells 

none-the-lessons uttered / crackslip

forged fundamental.  

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Nicolette Ratz (she/her) is a Wisconsin-raised poet, science writer, and seasonal worker. Her poems exist in Cream City Review, Bellingham Review, Ghost City Review, Hominum, and others. Find out why she is drawn to winter and cold places, even in summer, at nicoletteratz.com.